ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 15 number 1 april 2010

1 an account of the performance of

‘‘the chymical wedding’’ from the
perspective of a member of the
audience (as we imagined it)
n 1 January 2008 I joined a number of david burrows
O spectators on the steps of Tate Britain to
witness ‘‘The Chymical Wedding’’ performed by
simon o’sullivan
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Plastique Fantastique, a group styling themselves

as a band of mummers ‘‘from the extreme past
and future.’’1 The gang, who by sporting masks
took up the roles of various avatars that they
named as eternal forms and redundant commod-
ity forms, had already paraded along the banks of
the Thames before assembling on the steps to
make a proclamation. One avatar, which the
group referred to as Fox-Owl (presumably, an
eternal form), announced that a wedding was to
take place and that a contract was to be written in
pain and in blood that would prove, once and for
all, that there was ‘‘no such thing as the sexual
relation.’’ This strange declaration, that begged
reference to psychoanalytic concepts,2 was met
with joyous cries and applause that soon evolved
into an incessant chanting, drumming and sing-
ing as the group entered the building. Serving as
a wedding march, this riotous racket gradually
petered out as the mummers arrived at the central
atrium. Here the group called for silence from the
assembled audience and we all fell mute as the
performers began to strip one of their number.
With some care, the group took away the mask
and cloak, and therefore the identity, of one of
the redundant commodity forms they all called
Subkast Kofke.3 At this, some of my fellow
audience members laughed and heckled and
others muttered their displeasure at not being
able to hear or see the performance clearly. I,
however, amongst others, entered into the spirit
‘‘THE CHYMICAL
WEDDING’’
performance art as
masochistic practice
(an account, the
contracts and further
reflections)
of the performance and began to feel myself
strangely involved.
The ceremony continued with Fox-Owl
demanding that the mummers hand over differ-
ent articles of the contract. With much show,
each member of the group handed forth an item
to dress the ‘‘naked’’ Subkast Kofke who was
thus transformed by a black hood and bindings of
various kinds into a blind and straining body.
This took several minutes during which many
members of our sizeable ‘‘congregation’’ who
were unable to see the ceremony grew restless.
When the articles had been administered, the-
no-longer-Subkast Kofke twitched like a frigh-
tened animal, issuing piercing cries that
reminded me of a stuck pig. What was intended

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/10/010139^10 ß 2010 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2010.496178

139
 ‘‘the chymical wedding’’
by this transformation? Whether Subkast Kofke
had become bride or groom, or beast or sacrifice,
or defiled priest or slave, was difficult to ascertain
at this point of the proceedings. Perhaps the
significance of the symbolic erasure of Subkast
Kofke was merely a preparation of some kind for
the arrival of something else?
In fact, this was not a bad guess on my part as
the players greeted the hooded and trussed new
arrival with the words, ‘‘Welcome Third Thing!’’
At this point in the proceedings a wave of white
noise erupted and rolled through the atrium, so
loud that I raised my fingers to my ears to ease
the discomfort produced by this torturous sonic
assault. The sound track accompanied the
appearance of a figure, projected high above the
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mummers, who the group referred to as an angel.
The apparition was projected onto the wall and
spoke in mysterious terms that perhaps only Dr
John Dee himself might have fully understood.4
Nevertheless, there was one phrase uttered that
struck a chord with me. The angel called for the
one who was made in the image of his father to be
erased through the honouring of a contract to be
made in pain and blood. I was not the only
member of the audience to interpret this as a
reference to masochism.
The mummers then walked the bewildered and
stumbling hooded and bound figure to the North
Duveen Gallery to be whipped. The audience
followed – but we stood at a distance from the
group. The whipping was not gentle and the
crack of rubber on the body of the hooded figure
echoed in the great hall, as did the whoops and
laughter and whistles of the mummers. This
onslaught of punishing blows and lashes lasted
for a full eight minutes, growing steadily in force.
I realised later that I reacted in a number of ways
at this point of the performance, as did the
‘‘congregation’’ who expressed similar thoughts
and feelings to my own after the event. I was in
turn bemused, mildly shocked and embarrassed
by the violence. The whipping and beating grew
steadily worse until the hooded figure could bear
no more and uttered the safe words, ‘‘Mercy,
Mercy Third Thing!’’ All at once, I felt excited,
amused and repelled by this spectacle, which was
both comic and disturbing. On hearing this cry
all players ceased their whipping. The audience
too relaxed. I could feel that they were relieved
that the ordeal was over for the bound figure,
even though many had enjoyed its comedy, as
had I. There was something satisfying to eyes and
ears in the image of bodies shaping to administer
a stream of blows and the noise of their delivery.
Again there was a deafening sound and the
angel appeared once more, projected above the
head of the whipped figure, declaring that the
contract had been honoured, that the thing that
stood before us was not a man or woman, indeed
that we should understand that there was no
longer such a thing as a man or woman thing,
‘‘ . . . only a Chymical Thing . . . a Third Thing
that might be a fourth or four hundredth thing!’’
Whips were then placed at the feet of the hooded
figure that stood still as a stone for several hours
until Fox-Owl untied the bindings that had held
arms and legs tight. It was at this point in the
ceremony, when the punishment had ceased, that
an image that had been unconsciously germinated
by ‘‘The Chymical Wedding’’ became clear.
Mixed up with the images of the defiled priest-
bride-groom-slave that traversed the body of the
Third Thing was the image of the hooded Iraqi
prisoner from Abu Ghraib prison. This final
hallucinogenic image was the most disturbing
aspect of the whole event. The figure, blind and
bound with arms and legs outstretched, resting
after the beating, seemed beyond the concerns of
the world, a veritable ‘‘vacuole of non-commu-
nication,’’ and yet haunted by this image of war
and torture. All who attended attested to this
strange and disturbing composite.
2 the contracts of the performance
written through pain and abject
humiliation (as we enacted them)
‘‘The Chymical Wedding’’ was performed to
enact a masochistic pact of sorts, to make a play
of the relations between desiring bodies and the
laws that govern their association. This might also
be figured as a retying of ‘‘psychic relations’’
between the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the
Real; a brand new knot of the RSI.5 In this ‘‘The
Chymical Wedding’’ was as an alchemical
transformation involving the production of some-
thing new from within the same.
140

A wedding is also always a contract, and ‘‘The
Chymical Wedding’’ was no exception. Indeed,
this wedding involved a number of contracts, for
this was not just a personal affair but also an
artwork: a staging of certain relations and stories,
a self-conscious presentation made by individuals
who performed for an audience. If it is to be
reductively read (and how else might one write
about an event that has already happened?) ‘‘The
Chymical Wedding’’ consisted of two types of
contracts: those concerned with relations between
people, institutions and history (social contracts)
and those detailing the roles of performers and
the protocols of the performance itself (maso-
chistic contracts).
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i the social contracts
The institutional contract: first, there was the
contract between the gallery/museum (in this
case, Tate Britain) and the performers (in this
case, the group Plastique Fantastique) who were
allowed to enter the building and undertake
certain actions after giving the guarantee that no
harm would come to the exhibits or themselves or
the audience. There was no direct contract made
between performers and audience, however; they
did as they pleased, as did we, within boundaries
set by the institutional contract. (‘‘The Chymical
Wedding’’ was not a relational artwork; there was
no conviviality here). Money was exchanged for
services rendered. This, the first contract between
parties, was the condition of possibility for the
performance.
The historical contract: second, an agreement was
made that bound the group of performers
together, albeit temporarily, with an identity of
sorts that gave each member the social status of
performance artist, enforcing articles of the
institutional contract above. This involved a
further contract of a kind with the history of
performance, for before performance art is any-
thing else it is a performance about performance.
This was, after all, an affair of representation.
ii the masochistic contracts
The contract of fiction: third, there was the
contract, or the protocols, of the performance
141
burrows & o’sullivan
itself: the writing of a fiction (by two of the
group) and of an internal consistency agreed on
and to be enacted by the performers. This
involved the invention of fictional avatars from
fictional situations – and the propagation of a
‘‘new’’ story involving redundant commodities
and eternal forces (a marriage of things out of
time). In this fiction one of the players was to be
submitted to expurgation from the group so as to
produce a suspension of agency (so as to become
a ‘‘thing’’). Intended in all of this was the
production of a specifically different subjective
formation. The performance, after all, was to
involve a transformation.
The contract of pain and of its administration:
fourth, there was the contract detailing the
violence to be administered to the body of the
individual playing the slave by the other
performers. The latter would humiliate and
abuse, and bind and hood, and whip and beat
the former until the pain grew too much and the
safe words were uttered. The whipping was to be
as extreme and dramatic as the performers could
make it but would not end in injury or death.
(Note: this is not a contract between sadists and
masochists, for as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out,
countering Freud’s assertion that masochism may
well be an inversion of sadism,6 the masochist
draws up a contract with another or induces,
seduces or employs others to humiliate and inflict
violence upon him or herself.7 Masochism is
precisely a technology of the self.
The contract of shame and humour: a further
masochistic contract bound all the performers –
an embracing of the shame of the performance
itself (and of those who refuse to give up on their
desires; for contra Lacan we assert masochism to
be a viable strategy that pushes the subject
beyond the ‘‘economy of goods,’’ but only by first
becoming a ‘‘thing’’ to be played with).8
Embracing shame here is the paradoxical affirma-
tion of all that is ‘‘not’’ in us, the stuff we cannot
but deny (put bluntly, our bodies). In the case of
performance art, it is also the shame of putting
oneself forward for ridicule by engaging in
‘‘perverse’’ nonsense: a facing up to contempt
(including self-contempt). With this contract
the performers agree to go beyond judgement.
 ‘‘the chymical wedding’’
We open our mouths as wide as we can and
swallow judgement whole and then shit it out the
other end, purging our subjectivities of paranoia.
This is the transformative power of ritual
humiliation, that is, performance art. This
shame involves a gallows-humour of a kind: a
comedy of the law and of a sticking-to-the-letter
of the protocols, to see the performance out to its
very end. Here we produce a bastard and base
joy. The unnatural union of a Spinoza–Bataille
(note: Deleuze, again, remarks that the sadist is
an ironist in subverting the law through parody.
The masochist, on the other hand, is a humorist
who subverts the law through exaggeration and
inviting his or her own ‘‘punishment’’).9
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The contract of non-interpretation and of
asignification (when the nostrils twitch and
the blood boils): there might be a sixth contract,
one that is entered into only by crossing a
threshold (passing through abjection and humi-
liation), in which it is agreed to explore and
experiment with sensation and intensity in order
to erase meaning. The work (the performance) in
fact only works when its signifying components
stop working. This entailed a refusal to interpret
and an agreement to follow a programme until all
signifying regimes evaporated, until they seemed
like so much hot air leaving behind the cold
stillness of a ‘‘Body without Organs.’’10 Careful
preparation is required to reap the potential
treasure of this contract (after all, masochism is a
practice rather than a lucky break). For the
contract of non-interpretation to be enacted a
certain style is needed; the body must tingle with
pain, the whip arm must fly and the blood must
course hotly through the body (of the spectators,
tormentors and slave) for this threshold to be
crossed.
The contract of sacred time: there is perhaps a
seventh contract, one that is in and out of time.
To put things plainly, through play and pain
there is an untimely mixing of myth and
sensation, producing a schizo-time for a schizo-
subjectivity. All performers agree to enter into
this collective project of schizoanalysis. All
performers also partake of the strange tempor-
ality of the event as a rupture in a given situation,
most importantly, to explore a break with the
logic of everyday life and commodity obsession,
and the usual art careerism and its commodity
fetishism. Much time and money is invested in
preparing for the performance, in making props
and running through the protocols, all of which
are ‘‘burnt’’ in the actual performance (as is the
case with all weddings or sacred ceremonies). At
the heart of the sacred, sacrifice is always present.
Indeed, how else might the finite access the
infinite? In fact this is more than an agreement, it
is a moment that is irresistible, that overcomes all
involved and is realised through an investment
that all at once sees and seizes the event.
The contract of caution and of non-destruction:
there is perhaps an eighth contract, which might
in fact be only an article of the fourth, but one
that follows from recognising the dangers of the
latter, and of the sixth and seventh. This contract
details the safe words that, once uttered, signal
the end of any punishment. For to separate the
body from signifying strata too quickly, or to
burn all bridges back to the world of social
signification, can be a dangerous if not fatal
process (masochism is always an art of dosages).
More than this, bodies can get carried away, and
social strata can themselves produce a cancerous
‘‘Body without Organs’’ that is fascistic and
deathly, that preys upon the life of the people.
The image of the Iraqi prisoner that emerged like
the bad conscience at the end of the performance
is a reminder of the dangers of a fascist ‘‘bodies
without organs’’ (one in which the Crusader who
wants to enjoy occupation and total dominance
becomes a death-machine).
Following the contracts of the performance is a
complex affair but one that leads to an alchemical
event. In the case of ‘‘The Chymical Wedding,’’
this event was the production of an apparition
that was both in and out of time. After the safe
words had been uttered, and as the beaten slave
stands shaking and slowly recovering, the body of
the slave, inscribed with the violence and fictions
of the performance, becomes an image on the
move, a new-avatar-in-process:
sacrificial figure of a folk play $ prisoner of
Abu Ghraib $ a headless man – Acephale $
ghost-demon of the Black-arts of the CIA $
142

upside-down Masonic ritual $ comic-death-
jester in fancy dress $ ducking-chair for a
crab like witch . . .
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3 some further reflections on the
performance as event (as we look
back on it)
The masochistic performance (‘‘The Chymical
Wedding’’) is a merging of two things to activate
a Third Thing: (i) the writing of a fiction (S)
(a myth of renewal), (ii) is wedded to a technology
of the body through performance (R) (an opening
up of the body through masochistic play), (iii)
producing hallucinations, wild images and intense
sensations (I) (an outside to signification and the
symbolic).
To be involved in this masochistic reversal of
paternal law, through inviting punishment and
humiliation, is to engage in a process of
becoming-‘‘thing,’’ of passing into a state of
abjection, becoming an object of fun and ridicule.
In embracing the role of this ‘‘plaything,’’ the
world of judgement and prohibition is turned
upside down. But if this is all there was to
masochism then Lacan would be right, maso-
chism would be a limiting practice, merely a
symbolic play and nothing more than a perverse
‘‘economy of goods.’’ But the ‘‘thing’’ produced
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burrows & o’sullivan
by masochism is never just ‘‘goods.’’ This fleshy
thing is in fact a surface for fresh inscriptions and
for new adventures. This manufactured thing can
access The Thing: those forces and intensities
that lie below habit, that secret and hidden place
that both attracts and repulses. We repeat, only
through becoming a plaything can The Thing be
accessed.
We do not call or diagnose ourselves maso-
chists, rather we produce a masochistic perfor-
mance. But then we contend that there are no
masochists as such (in private or in public), only
acts of masochism or simply acts that express the
desire to become a thing. In that we are a group
punishing one of our own (as well as ourselves
through submitting to humiliation), we are not so
unlike other so-called masochists. However,
instead of desiring the cold love and cruelty of
the mother (as Freud said of all masochists), we
hanker after the cruel laughter of our own
society, to laugh ourselves into oblivion and back.
We have claimed that our performance art is
not only a masochistic practice but also a form of
schizoanalysis. How can that be? To reiterate, and
to make things clear, embarrassment and humi-
liation were important to the transformative
process of the performance; that is, without
both performers and spectators embracing a
shameful state of affairs, judgement and punish-
ment remain a block or a brake in the production
of the new. In this, we address the environment
and society (the gallery and its constituency) that
the performance takes place within, for the
‘‘museum is ill’’ and the subjectivities and
relations it produces are too rigid and not
healthy.
In forming this view we are drawing on Jean
Oury’s statement, and idea, that the ‘‘hospital is
ill.’’11 In fact, we find performance has many
things in common with Oury’s practice of
institutional psychotherapy, not least in its
focus on the space (and time) of treatment.
Oury remarked that the body and mind of the
schizoid patient is never still and cannot connect
to the space that it is apparently in; therefore, the
problems of the patient cannot be addressed
unless the question of how to connect a schizoid
body and mind to an environment (in this case,
the hospital) is also addressed. Group activity is
 ‘‘the chymical wedding’’
used to ‘‘graft’’ an opening, a connection to an
environment, onto this continually travelling
body and mind. The masochistic performance
(as schizoanalysis) is an institutional psychother-
apy of a kind too, only one in reverse. Rather
than grafting an opening onto the schizoid body
that connects with the order of a specific
environment (the hospital), we aim to graft an
opening onto the order of an environment (the
body of the museum or gallery) to connect with
the schizoid within us all. Masochistic perfor-
mance is one technology that grows just such an
orifice.
It is through this grafted opening (produced by
the performance of ‘‘The Chymical Wedding’’)
that hallucinations of a political, historical,
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religious and aesthetic nature are conjured. As
with the ravings of the so-called
mad, all the pasts, presents and
futures that may or may never
come to pass are paraded for all
who wish to see them.
notes
‘‘Plastique Fantastiqie’’ is a mythopoetic and per-
formative fiction produced by David Burrows and
Simon O’Sullivan. The collaboration involves an
ongoing investigation of the relations between
aesthetics, politics and the sacred conducted
through objects, installations, comics, texts, and
performances in which others also take part.
Exhibitions and performances include: ‘‘Staabucks
Fukkee is Your Enemy,’’ Aliceday Gallery, Brussels,
2007; ‘‘The Chymical Wedding,’’ Tate Britain,
London, 2008; ‘‘Protocols for Deceleration,’’
Outpost, Norwich, 2008; ‘‘Black Mass for Partial
Objects,’’ for ‘‘Event Horizon’’ at the Royal
Academy, London, 2008 ^ 09; ‘‘StrangerThings are
Happening,’’ Aspex, Portsmouth, 2009;
‘‘Multiverse,’’ Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London,
2009; and ‘‘A Visitation,’’ Tatton Park Biennale,
2010. For more information see 5www.
plastiquefantastique.org4.
1 The word ‘‘mummers’’ refers to a group of
masked players who visited households, often
unbidden, to perform a play in expectation of
food and drink. The practice, first recorded in the
thirteenth century and common throughout parts
of England from the fourteenth to the nineteenth,
was repeatedly banned for giving cover to
anonymous criminal behaviour. See Ronald
Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (Oxford: Oxford
UP,1996) 11^96.
2 Jacques Lacan theorised that there was no such
thing as the sexual relationship, any relationship
being mediated by representation ^ and that it is
love that ‘‘makes up’’ for the (non-existent) sexual
relationship. See Jacques Lacan, Encore: The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, trans. Bruce
Fink (New York: Norton,1999) 38 ^50.
3 Subkast Kofke is an avatar from previous
Plastique Fantastique performances derived from
the twisting of the phrase Staabucks Fukkee that
was in turn a twisting of the phrase Starbucks
Coffee. See 5www.plastiquefantastique.org4 for
further details of performances, writings and
other matters.
4 Dr John Dee, during the reign of Elizabeth I, and
with the help of scriveners such as Edward Kelley,
spoke to angels and eternal beings, interpreting
and writing down all his communication and
dialogue.
5 ‘‘A brand new knot for the RSI’’refers to Jacques
Lacan’s concept of subjectivity envisaged as a
Borremean Knot in which the Real (R), Symbolic
(S) and the Imaginary (I) are tied together in such
a way that if one loop were to be cut the knot
would fall apart, and the subject become ‘‘untied.’’
In such cases, only a new form of knot can tie the
subject back into the order of things. See Jacques
Lacan 118 ^36. ‘‘The Chymical Wedding’’ might be
figured as the writing of a brand new knot in this
sense (albeit a temporary and somewhat fragile
one).
6 Freud argued that masochism is a perversion
that has three aspects: the infantile (a desire for
childhood punishment), the feminine (the desire of
a man to occupy the subservient position of the
female), and the moral (the desire to be punished
for some wrongdoing of the past). At one point,
recognising the problem of an activity that is not
focused on pleasure but displeasure, he suggests
that masochism is the inversion of sadism, which
in liberal times is suppressed as an activity. See
Sigmund Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism
[1924] in On Metapsychology, trans. Angela Richards
(London: Penguin,1984) 409^26.
7 See Coldness and Cruelty: Masochism (New York:
Zone, 1989). A psychoanalytical understanding of
masochism, as presented in Sacher-Masoch’s
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 burrows & o’sullivan
fiction, views the man, Severin, submitting himself
to torture delivered by the woman,Venus/Wanda,
which is further read as a desiring of punishment
to be delivered by the mother (103^10). This, in
turn, is viewed as a negation of the law of the
father who punishes to prevent incest between
mother and son. In Sacher-Masoch’s fiction, the
law of the father is then subverted as the punish-
ment Severin receives affirms an erotic relation-
ship with the woman/mother figure. What is
important about this story is that through fiction,
and an enactment that involves different roles and
the taking up of invented names, the law is sub-
verted. In the performance of ‘‘The Chymical
Wedding,’’ the fiction is played out between indivi-
dual and group, but a fictionalising of erotic, social
and symbolic relationships is still produced.
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8 See Lacan’s remarks in The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter; ed. Jacques
Alain-Miller (London: Routledge, 1992) on Sacher-
Masoch and on the perverse masochist who
desires to ‘‘reduce himself to this nothing that is
the good, to this thing that is treated like an
object, to this slave whom one trades back and
forth and whom one shares’’ (239). A question
might be posed as to whether masochism
consists solely of this play of goods, as depicted in
Sacher-Masoch’s fiction, or whether masochism,
as a technology of the body, allows for an intensive
experience that goes ‘‘beyond’’ the symbolic.
9 See chapter 7, ‘‘Humour, Irony and the Law’’ in
Deleuze,Coldness and Cruelty 81^90.
10 On the ‘‘Body without Organs,’’ see Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988)
149^ 66.The practice of masochism is one example
given of how to build a Body without Organs.
11 See David Reggio, ‘‘The Hospital is Ill: An
Interview with Dr. Jean Oury,’’ available
5http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/history/news-events/
interview1.pdf4 (accessed 29 July 2008).

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‘‘the chymical wedding’’

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 ‘‘the chymical wedding’’
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David Burrows
Birmingham Institute of Art & Design (BIAD)
Gosta Green
Corporation Street
Birmingham B4 7DX
UK
E-mail: david.burrows@bcu.ac.uk

Simon O’Sullivan
Visual Cultures
Goldsmiths College
University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
UK
E-mail: s.o’sullivan@gold.ac.uk